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If we consider "All the President's Men" a kind of "Hamlet" for the Watergate scandal, then "Mark Felt" is its "Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead." The movie provides intriguing insight into the actions and attitudes of one supporting player in "President's Men," associate FBI director Felt, who served as the Washington Post's secret source known for decades only as "Deep Throat."

Post reporter Bob Woodward, played by Robert Redford in the 1976 movie, is here little seen (and the actor playing him looks nothing like Redford nor Woodward, instead resembling Woodward's reporting partner, Carl Bernstein). The movie is all Felt, all the time, and Liam Neeson plays him as a confident but conflicted man who has staked out the moral high ground, looking down on most everyone else.

For Watergate obsessives and dabblers, "Mark Felt" is mandatory viewing, just as it insists with its awkward and overreaching subtitle, "The Man Who Brought Down the White House." Casual viewers will find less to latch onto, as Felt's personal life is limited to an icy wife (Diane Lane, uncomfortably channeling Mary Tyler Moore from "Ordinary People") and a missing daughter, the pursuit of whom causes him to break his own ethics code.

The behind-the-scenes FBI scenes are often riveting and always eye-opening, especially those with Nixon lackey L. Patrick Gray (a fine Marton Csokas), who became interim FBI director after J. Edgar Hoover died. The top-notch supporting cast also includes Tony Goldwyn, Josh Lucas, Bruce Greenwood, Brian d'Arcy James and an especially creepy Tom Sizemore as Hoover's hatchet man, who goes to work for Nixon.

The filmmaker is Peter Landesman, who specializes in fact-based conspiracy films, having previously directed the earnest "Parkland" and "Concussion." (He also wrote "Kill the Messenger," another real-life whistleblower tale.) With little to photograph besides people talking, he often opts for camera gimmicks that are more distracting than energizing, and the color palette might be described as "faded Polaroid." Sometimes the acting overcomes the pretentious photography, sometimes the reverse.

The drama mostly turns on FBI resistance to a White House-led attempt to shut down its Watergate investigation, a story line with recently revitalized importance. Whether today's FBI is stocked with all the noble, virtually incorruptible agents seen in "Mark Felt" — and whether it ever really was — makes for interesting conjecture.